In the following review of Virtual Light, Lanchester asserts that Gibson's strengths as a writer are his prose style and his ability to imagine and create a fantastic world in inventive detail.

There is, within the interlinked fields of computing and media technology, a widespread view that the complex set of innovations currently taking place is about to reach critical mass. When this happens, the Information Revolution will finally, belatedly, begin to have as big an effect on the world as did the Industrial Revolution. The official term used to describe this stimulatingly vague nexus of emerging technologies is “multimedia”. Technicians at Apple Computer have a better word for this future: they call it The Blob.

William Gibson is the poet and visionary of The Blob. The trilogy of novels he published during the 1980s...